Wednesday, June 08, 2005

global warming news stories

This is interesting. Two and a half stories break about global warming, a month before the G8 summit.

First, several science academies around the world havesaid, uniformly, that global warming is a real thing, humans are doing it, and there's no real controversy about it. You can read the Royal Society's statement here, and their press release here.

At the same time, Rick Piltz, who just resigned from the office that coordinates federal programs on climate change, has accused Philip Cooney, the chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, of doctoring the administration's reports on global warming. Piltz claims Cooney modified the documents to seem like there's a lot more controversy about global warming than there really is.

While looking through news articles (Google News is your friend!), I also came across this interesting tidbit from the Herald Sun:

Also yesterday, a British newspaper claimed to have seen official papers showing pressure from oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil partly prompted President George W. Bush to reject the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Citing documents from the US State Department, the London-based Guardian newspaper said the administration thanked Exxon executives for the company's "active involvement" in helping to shape climate change policy, and also sought its advice on what such policies the company might find acceptable. Exxon has maintained it had no involvement in the Government's rejection of Kyoto.

Finally, for those who are interested, you can find the U.N.'s statistics on carbon dioxide emissions per capita, for several countries, here.

Update: Thanks to polianna.com for this tidbit: the Christian Science Monitor reports that, in a recent Senate hearing, the FBI and ATF said they were increasingly concerned about eco-terrorists:

But CNN reports that there was a fair amount of skepticism from some senators about the FBI and DEA's assessment of the threat level from these groups. Independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont noted that the number of people possibly threatened by any action of ALF or ELF numbered perhaps in the dozens, "but an incident at a chemical, nuclear or wastewater facility would threaten tens of thousands."

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If you have a real legal question, you need to get a real lawyer who can look at the real facts of your real question and give you a real answer. Seriously. It really depends a lot on your exact facts, and the law changes all the time.

If you tell a judge "I know it's the law because someone named False Data, who lives in a different state (or country), put it on a blog," the judge will laugh at you. And then you'll lose your case.